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A dream comes true.

Coffee?

CoFFee?

Coffeeeeeeee?

Coffeecoffeecoffee?

Coffcoffcoffee?

The flight attendant sounds as bored as I feel. My legs don’t feel at all, although,
bizarrely, my feet ache. You know it’s a
long flight when breaking the “four hours to go” barrier feels like an
achievement. The engines drone. The
pages of a book flick over, their contents read but immediately forgotten, a
process that passes time but brings no enjoyment or understanding. It reminds me of RE at school. For some reason I stifle a yawn. Three hours and fifty-eight minutes to
go. Sleep. Film. Angry Birds. Read.
Dubai! (Brief relief) Hurried transfer. Muscat, Oman. Ah – a shower
beckons. No Bags. A shower recedes. Relief recedes. Stress gives me an energy hit to counteract
the lack of sleep.

After twenty minutes of fruitless searching I give up and come
to the fogged brain conclusion that my bag is taking an extended break in
Dubai, while I, smelly from too long in the air, have moved on to Muscat. I’m given a pale printed lost baggage receipt
and a promise that the bag will arrive soon.
I treat the first like gold dust and the second with scepticism. The taxi feels surprisingly spacious with so
few bags. My companions resist making
the obvious joke, so I make it for them.
We all fall silent as the taxi pushes past 140 kmh and flirts with 150.
The engine and gear box squeal in protest.
I try to ignore the constant beeping of a speed alarm. It’s difficult.

The airport is ring fenced with building sites, new roads
and bridges linking apparently empty sand to almost identical pieces of empty
sand. Later I learn this is all part of
the Sultan’s response to Oman’s brief Arab Spring. “We want jobs!” was the demand and
“Infrastructure” was the response. Vast piles of sand dot the worksites, compacted
berms of pale dust pushed by the bright yellow engines of industry. My memory
flashes to childhood sand pits and Matchbox diggers. There are few plants,
fewer rivers and next to no shade. Wide
drains seem to speak of days of weather I can’t imagine. Behind the JCB dust clouds, lines of hills –
mountains maybe – flow along next to the coast.
Muscat is a city hemmed by hills and waves – long, but thin. The soil,
even the rock, looks open, dry and thirsty.
The hills could drink all the water in the world and still ask for
more. Yet closer to town many of the
roads are flanked by strips of luminous green.
Grass coaxed from the ground with hand held water pipes and the detailed
care of people in blue boiler suits.
This seems like a denial of nature, but with near limitless money I
suppose you can ignore the need to be real. For today at least this may be
possible, but I have to wonder about tomorrow or the next day.

It’s clear from the outset that Muscat is not Dubai. Dubai is all thrust and mismatch, pale needle
thin spires that reach ever upwards, great slabs of glass shaped like boats squeezed
between pillars of steel. It’s Blade
Runner, with sunlight, no rain and (as far as I am aware) no killer replicants.
Muscat sits at both a lower and a higher
level than Dubai. Physically all its
buildings are much, much lower. Some
form of legislation is in place that restricts the height of new buildings;
nothing (with one possible exception) towers over you, although that does not
mean the buildings are not impressive. The
buildings in Muscat seem to share a common architectural language that is
missing in Dubai. They may be low to the
ground, but they have a far higher degree of connection. Dubai’s buildings are
all “look at me” sort of things; they hold the eye by sheer force of individual
difference and eccentricity. Muscat’s buildings
have a more collective appeal. The
conformity highlights rather than hides the differences, and the building to
building continuity grounds the whole townscape in a single space. It takes far more care to create differences
when the starting point is always the same. For all the modern freeways being
built, Muscat feels gentle, although I doubt the builders and gardeners in their
all encompassing blue boiler suits would necessarily agree.

We drive along the coast for a while and pale, white gulls
float on the sea breezes. Flocks of waders bubble up from the water’s edge. I wonder what species they are and think about
my guide book. It’s in my bag. It’s still in Dubai. Two-tone crows, black and silky grey, pick at
beach wash and hang around the hotel car park in loose, talkative, groups. Long tailed parrots, with rapid, blurring
wing beats, land on window ledges and roof racks. Swallows flicker through the
shade of the hotel entrance. In the
distance a large bird of prey swings round and round and round, soaring in a
column of hot air rising into the cloudless blue sky.

My bags as still on holiday as I shuffle into the back seat
of another taxi. Even with the limited
self awareness of jet lag I know I need some new clothes. It may have been better if I had sat in the
front seat. Trying to register for the
conference turns out to be a waste of time: the information in the programme is
as wrong as wrong can be. Wrong place,
wrong time, just plain wrong. My sense
of humour is stretched very, very thin. And
then something happens that bursts through the sense of gloom.

Outside the hotel are hibiscus bushes, bright red flowers
and dense shiny leaves. But that’s not
it. It’s what’s under the bush that
pushes away the grey gloom. It’s a
hoopoe. The main body of the bird is an
orange hued pink, the wings barred with black and white stripes, its bill
sharply downturned. The rarely raised
crest points back from the crown of the head like a comic blur of motion. It’s a lifer for me, but that’s not the
point. The real point is that this is a
bird I have wanted to see for the best part of 40 years. And here it is, in a hotel car park, under
the punch bright sun of an Arabian sky.
It’s a long way from Somerset. As
a kid I would look at the few bird books I had then – The Observer’s Book of
Birds and the Eye-spy Book of Birds – and wonder if birds like the Hoopoe were
real, or whether they were just figments of ornithological imagination. How could they be real when most of the birds
I saw were sparrows, blackbirds and pigeons?
I would go out into the fields around my village with the hope that I would
return with a prize catch, but it never happened. I may as well have looked for the Phoenix or
the Roc as a Hoopoe. They were the kind
of never bird that made you keep looking.
Even when birds were on the back-burner and I fished I didn’t forget what
a hoopoe looked like – and the flash of a kingfisher or the chess board bob of
a dipper kept birds alive in my head.
But I never saw a hoopoe. Until
there was one under the bushes, by a busy road in Oman. Clearly it’s a distinctive bird, but there
was never any possibility that the bird in the bush was anything but a hoopoe. There
was an instant rush of recognition and that strange and rare feeling of a wish
come true. Seeing this bird won’t change
the course of my life – it’s not that kind of wish – but it reinforces the
truth that sometimes, under special and remarkable conditions, wishes can come
true.

The hoopoe cooperated enough (just) to allow for some
pictures before it floated off into the distance, through the traffic, on short
rounded wings. I tried to explain to my
work mates why this was a red letter day, why this would be a day to scribble a
big star in my diary, but while they seemed to understand each individual word
I was saying, I was talking another
language. You either know why this is
important or you don’t. If you do
understand you are probably already a birder, and if you don’t understand I
feel sorry for you.

In the late afternoon my bag arrived and I’d be lying if I
said that did not rank almost as highly as the hoopoe. That evening I watched the sun set over the
long bay of Muscat. The sky and the sea
turned gold as the sun sank behind a jagged line of clouds. It hung like a broken orange segment slowly
slipping behind the curve of the Earth. The
short dusk wrapped us quickly in darkness.
It was day’s end, and I had many reasons to smile.

9 comments:

Very nice story. It just shows that travel is worth it. I have been in that listless state. It can drive one bonkers. I read about 3 books during the whole journey......but your lifebird experience makes it all worth.....and you'll remember that better than the issue of the lost luggage. It's happened to me several time....France and Chile. Now I prepare a day bag full of survival goodies....and contact solution:)

We had a hoopoeturn up in Allonby about 5 years ago. Village was full of twitchers but I dipped on it. Saw one in Portugal - they are indeed stunning.Share your pain with the missing case. Some pillock packed a red suitcase and apparently forgot the colour on the 2 hour flight home because he took my black one from the carousel.

Great tale Stewart, You know I love your verbalisation and this is completely within my own experience except for the Hoopoe bird, where I can only say 'if only'.If you were staying in Muscat by the sea, you must have been in Old MUscat. Did you per chance stay in the super posh hotel with the terraced gardens that only the very wealthy German tourists could afford and we only had a glimpse at the opulent foyer.

Oh yes you did have many reasons to smile!! Thanks for sharing more of the story -- (it made ME smile!) I hadn't ever heard of a hoopoe until reading your other blog...it seems almost as improbable as seeing a bird out of a Dr Seuss book! I'm just happy to have seen it virtually.

I am a bit late reading this post, but want to say that I very much appreciate you sharing the pictures...When I was a teenager in the late 1980's, I read an epic novel called "The Source," which depicts the events that occur on a piece of land in Israel from prehistory all the way to the 20th century. One of its chapters is called "Psalm of the hoopoe bird," and to this day I remember reading it and wondering if I would ever see, rather than merely read, what a hoopoe looks like...Thanks to you, now I have!